2 x 6 cores of Intel Quad-Core Xeon E5 Processors running at 2.7Ghz. These have the major advantage of the cores being on one single die – not separated as many multicore processors are. The single die shares its 30Mb of L3 cache readily with the 12 processor cores and the result is fast access to cached data and far greater performance. The system memory is all connected by an integrated memory controller giving direct and instant access to data in memory considerably reducing latency. An integrated memory controller together with fast DDR3 ECC SDRAM at 1866MHz gives a great increase in memory bandwidth allowing more data to be fed fast to the processors and avoid them waiting for data to arrive.

The Mac Pro has Turbo Boost – the ability to dynamically boost the processor clock speed just when its needed and only the cores where it is required – up to 3.9Ghz on a 6 core system. The MacPro supports Hyper Threading, which allows two threads to run simultaneously on each core – so a 6 core presents 12 virtual cores that are recognised by MacOSX. This enables the processor to take full advantage of the resources available in each core. QuickPath Interconnect gives the Intel Xeon processors quick access to the hard drives, the I/O and other Mac Pro subsystems.

Xeon E5 Processors with 12 cores and very fast memory (up to 128Gb in four slots with 60 GBps bandwidth all on a single die. Thats 40 lanes of PCI Express (generation 3) throughput, up to 30Mb of L3 cache and over 500 gigaflops at peak performance!

With the New Thunderbolt 2 you are not limited to expansion inside your workstation enclosure! Thunderbolt 2 delivers throughput speeds of up to 20Gb/s to each external device. As each Thunderbolt 2 port allows daisy-chaining up to 6 peripherals, connecting massive amounts of storage becomes a given. You can also add a PCI expansion chassis and work with the latest 4k displays